The Nights Will Flame With Fire

I met a woman once whose home had burned.

She’d used the image as a metaphor for so long that it took some time to understand it had actually happened, it had happened to her, the fire; and that’s no metaphor, that’s about as literal as it gets. Her home had burned. She was in the building when the fire took hold, having dinner with her husband and their two children. It wasn’t arson or attempted murder; it was, rather, the most ordinary of tragedies, the result of a faulty electrical wire.

They lived above the art gallery where she showed her work. She collected found objects along the beach and added them to paintings. The fire started down there, among the pieces of shells and the sea glass glued to bright acrylic oceans, and it spread upward.

It was disaster on a domestic scale: no one died, no one was hurt, no one burned. The family got out in an orderly way and sat on the curb across the street watching the firefighters as they doused the flames. There was a paragraph about it in the local newspaper, and the insurance policy paid out enough to manage another roof over their heads.

But then, she told me, there was the odor, the odor that would wake her for years afterward in the night, the odor she thought would never leave her. The odor of the end of things. And she saw it, too, saw her home burning, over…